With ankle monitors, you can run but you can't hide

Friday

Feb 25, 2011 at 12:01 AMFeb 25, 2011 at 12:11 PM

In the mid-2000s, the population of the Beaver County Jail in Hopewell Township peaked at more than 400 inmates on any given day.

That has since dropped to an average of about 250 county inmates in the facility. One of the things that helped to lower that number - and with it, the cost of county corrections - is a small rectangular black device about the size of an iPhone.

It's an electronic monitoring device attached to a band and worn around a person's ankle; it's more commonly known, simply, as an ankle bracelet.

Bracelets cover a technological spectrum from units that can tell when a person enters and leaves a residence to units that use live GPS tracking to show a subject's whereabouts at all times, said Donald Neill, Beaver County's chief probation officer.

The county uses three main forms of monitoring: secure continuous remote alcohol monitors, or SCRAM, which detect alcohol in the wearer's system; SCRAMx, which combines an alcohol monitor with a house arrest device in one unit; and GPS-tracking devices that continuously show a wearer's exact location using satellite technology.

Bracelets are a good option for low-risk, nonviolent offenders, Neill said. The majority of people sentenced to wear devices in the county are doing so for drunken driving and alcohol-related offenses.

Wearers have tried everything imaginable to block the alcohol sensor and take a drink, he said, including covering it with everything from bologna to peanut butter to cardboard. But the bracelets have proved to be sensitive and effective. They'll even generate an alert if someone tampers with the device or its leg band.

If a wearer damages a unit, he is responsible for paying for it - about $1,200 for a single device, Neill said.

Beaver County has utilized electronic monitoring in some form since 1992. But in the mid-2000s, when the jail population peaked, the county had only about 25 electronic monitoring devices on the street and a cap on the program's budget, Neill said.

Now about 100 people are on electronic monitoring on any given day, including about 90 people sentenced to wear devices and about 10 on pretrial monitoring.

Neill, who guided the program through its expansion, said he credits the county commissioners, court administrator and judges for "seeing the value of expanding the program and allocating the money to do that."

"We spent a little money to save a lot of money," he said.

Beaver County leases all of its monitoring devices from companies, and the cost of those leases is passed on to the device wearers.

The program is "pretty much self-sustaining," Neill said. And it saves money for the county in the long run.

That's because the cost of housing someone in the jail now works out to more than $50 a day, while the cost of using an electronic monitoring device is approximately $10 a day, paid by the wearer, he said.

Wearers are billed monthly, and the cost, which includes a supervision fee, works out to about $360 a month.

And with the additional space opened up in the jail, the facility has been able to "rent" beds to house federal and state prisoners, bringing in some additional funds to the county.

The county maintains a staff of five probation officers to monitor the devices and their wearers, checking a computer program regularly to make sure none of the bracelets have generated an alert. The officers can also use a program to track the exact location of people wearing GPS bracelets.

The officers also hold face-to-face meetings with people on electronic monitoring, usually weekly, Neill said.

Neill said the county's use of electronic monitoring could expand even further if current sentencing patterns continue in the courts.

"Last year the court started sentencing people to true intermediate punishment, and the number of people on electronic monitoring increased from 50 to about 90," he said. "We anticipate that number increasing even more."

More than 90 percent of county offenders sentenced to wear an electronic monitoring device successfully complete their sentences, he said.

"Generally, when they're on electronic monitoring, people behave," he said.

Of course, there are always exceptions. Neill recalled one situation about four years ago when a man wearing a monitoring device committed several burglaries.

But because the man was wearing a bracelet, "we knew where he was the whole time," Neill said. That made it pretty easy to place him at the crime scenes.

Statewide, Pennsylvania is encouraging counties to grow their electronic-monitoring programs as one way of fighting the chronic overcrowding of jails.

Prison-reform advocates say they, too, prefer the devices as an alternative to incarceration for nonviolent offenders.

"The prison experience is such a negative experience that for the nonviolent people, anything we can do to get them out earlier is going to be helpful long term," said William M. DiMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society.

DiMascio said that, if anything, Pennsylvania has been too slow to embrace the opportunity presented by electronic monitoring for getting people out from behind bars.

"We should take advantage of the technological advances that exist," he said.

Megan J. Miller can be reached at mjmiller@times online.com.

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